Much chops to Bad Science for pointing out Phun, a simulation environment/game/construction engine thingie that (judging from the videos) is just super fun (ho, ho, ho) to fiddle with. It seems a wonderfully open-ended platform for making stuff, which is of course the great strength of a pad and paper, or a bucket of Legos. This demo video gives a sense of the range of possibilities:
There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.
The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.
You could use something like VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org) to make a virtual machine, then load Linux or Windows on it and play it on your (Intal) Mac. VirtualBox is free.
I was all set to play with this at the office today, and it won’t run on my SuSE Linux box – some sort of problem recognizing the OpenGL accelerators. Hmph. It’s not quite high enough on my priority list to chase at the moment. It would be interesting to hear from anyone else who got it to work, though.
I would feel terrible if you haven’t seen this:
http://files.slembcke.net/chipmunk/movies/sketches.mov
It uses Chipmunk, but the software itself is not by Scott.